You can tell you’re back in Europe when the weather decides to play a large (and largely unwanted) role in your touring.

I was pretty sure, heading west from Alexandroupoli on Thursday, that I’d be able to update you on southern Bulgaria today. The weather was nice, the road was good, and the hills weren’t too big and threatening:

Xanthi on Thursday, then Drama on Friday, and Bulgaria on Saturday. Not even stupidly long days. Should have been easy.

And Thursday was fine, with the exception of a nagging headwind. More of a head-breeze, really, so not a major problem. The sun was out, the birds were singing (there seem to be a lot more birds here than in Turkey, for some reason), and all was well.

I even found that ultimate mark of civilisation, a Lidl supermarket, when I got to Xanthi. It was probably the busiest shop I’ve seen in Greece so far, which may be an indication that the Greeks’ economic woes are not yet all in the past.

My usual weather check that evening was where things started to go a bit sideways. A huge blob of slow-moving rain was due to cover pretty much the whole of northern Greece (and southern Bulgaria and Macedonia) for about 36 hours from yesterday afternoon (Friday).

This was unfortunate. You’ll be aware of my enthusiasm for getting completely soaked from previous posts. And this blob of rain had all manner of online weather warnings attached to it, so it looked like the internet didn’t think it was just going to fade away, either.

But you never know with weather forecasts. It’s not like they’re never wrong, is it? And this is Greece. And it’s almost summer. Surely it couldn’t rain that much?

So, proceeding according to plan, I twiddled away from Xanthi towards Drama. But it was already clouding up by the time I hit the coast at the Beach of the Giant Pineapples (above). It’s not really called that, by the way. And I’m pretty sure it’s actually some sort of palm…

I decided not to stop in Kavala, despite its impressive old town, complete with ancient castle and aqueduct (above – you might have to squint a bit to see the acqueduct).

I’d get as close as I could to Drama before the rain came. And hope that I didn’t get stuck in no-man’s-land between the two big towns. So, pausing only to have a quick look at the monastery at the top of the hill out of Kavala, I ploughed on.

And duly got stuck in no-man’s-land.

Last night was a bit damp. Today has been wet in an English summer sort of way – pouring with rain one minute, drizzling the next. Miserable. And not entirely helped by being stuck in the sort of village where a car driving down the main street would be a local talking point for weeks afterwards.

It’s my own fault. In retrospect, I could have got to Drama in the dry quite easily, but it just didn’t feel that way at the time.

If I’d been here a thousand or two years ago, things would have been different. Where now there are just a couple of villages, separated by the fairly large hill above, there was once a Greek / Roman city called Phillipi (roughly; the spellings, and even the name, have not been particularly consistent over the years).

It was on the Via Egnatia, which was the Roman ‘motorway’ between the western and eastern parts of the empire. And it was, by all accounts, a busy place; an administrative centre and a military site. It was also, apparently, the first place in Europe where St Paul started spreading Christianity to the Romans. Then it was abandoned. Pretty thoroughly. And used by the Ottomans as a quarry, according to Wikipedia.

So an interesting past, and a desolate and rain-soaked present. I do hope that’s not some sort of metaphor for the rest of my journey!

It shouldn’t be. The bike’s had a clean and fettle today, so I’ll be ready to head on to Bulgaria whenever the weather clears. Which will hopefully be tomorrow.

Mountains plunging into the sea provide stunning landscapes. Places where cultures bump into each other produce fascinating history (even where they also – all too often – provoke conflict). It’s at the edges where things are most compelling.

I’ve been in border country since the last post, although I’ve only really appreciated it today.

Bolu (above) was the last proper city in the hills. Since then, it’s been small towns and smaller climbs (and some immensely fun downhills), as I’ve crossed from the mountainous interior of Turkey back towards the Sea of Marmara.

And the sea (together with the Aegean, immediately to its south, and the city of Istanbul at its northern end) has been a cultural crossroads since people started writing history.

So the borderland between the hills and the coastal areas is also the edge of a fuzzy cultural boundary. Although I’m not in Europe yet, things are changing already. Up in Bolu, things still felt very Asiatic, with the fairly mono-cultural cityscape of mosques, minarets and square buildings dominating. Within a couple of hundred kilometres, things are much more cosmopolitan.

But the noticeable changes had already begun at Bolu. Just a few kilometres east of town, my road had been joined in its valley by a motorway.

That’s not just a road with a designation beginning with ‘M’, as was the case in the former Soviet countries. It’s a proper, European-style motorway (the main drag between Ankara and Istanbul). The sort of road where bikes are not allowed. It’s the first road I’ve seen for months that I can’t ride.

I know that this will be the new normal from here on (and that it’s my normal normal in any case). But I’ve got so used to rolling along whichever road I want that it feels like a big change. So does the fact that the chocolate bars in petrol stations have suddenly become the same as at home, where further east, they are all Turkish versions.

I think my perspective might have got a little skewed somewhere along the way…

There are still plenty of reminders that I’m not home just yet. It’s pretty certain that a flatbed van in Europe wouldn’t be allowed on the road with a ton of apples tied loosely on the back with string.

But that appears to be what caused me a twenty minute delay this morning:

Thankfully, things got slightly more organised after the big guy in the red shirt started waving his arms and shouting.

This afternoon (Tuesday), the cultural variety and complexity of this area became clearer. I dropped down to lake Iznik. I’d been trying to get to a town on the edge of the lake, which is marked up on Google Maps as ‘Nicaea’. And I’d been getting increasingly concerned that I’d not seen it signposted. I was just following signs for ‘Iznik’, and hoping that Nicaea would become obvious.

It turns out that Iznik and Nicaea are the same place. Google uses the Greek name for some unfathomable reason. Although that was the town’s name when it was established (by a Greek mythological character, apparently), it’s been Iznik for ever as far as the locals are concerned, and Google should probably have caught up by now.

But it’s not just the names of the town that show how many cultures have had a say in this region over the full course of recorded history. The city walls, which I casually parked the bike against on the way into town, were originally built by the Ancient Greeks. The local tourist guide notes, sadly, that ‘only Roman and Byzantine construction remains’. And that’s still not counting the role of this area of Turkey in the birth of the Ottoman Empire.

There’s an intimidating amount of history in this part of the world, on the edge of so may empires.

I’m going to have a day off tomorrow (Wednesday) to have a proper look around Iznik, and digest some of this stuff. It’s only about half a mile across, but has ancient churches, mosques, Roman arches, and so on. It even has a mosque called the Ayasofya, which used to be a church. Just like Istanbul. But much, much quieter.

I’m happy I can get all the layers of history around here, as I’ve decided not to head to the metropolis on the Bosphorus. I could probably have got to the outskirts today, and entered European Turkey tomorrow. But I’ve been to Istanbul before, and I’m not quite done with the Asian continent just yet. And I’ve heard a lot of nightmarish stories about the Istanbul traffic.

Instead, once I’ve had my rest, I’ll head along the south of the Sea of Marmara. It’ll take an extra few days to get to Europe, but I should see some more interesting places, and enjoy the coastline.

There’s one other, slightly fuzzy edge which merits a quick mention (in my book, at least). And that’s the edge of space. This is usually considered to be the Karman Line, and is 100km (62 miles) above the surface of the Earth.

Why is the Karman Line of any interest? Because, yesterday, while grinding up yet another incline, I reached 100,000 metres (or 100 km) of vertical gain on the round-the-world trip. I’ve climbed to the edge of space on a bicycle with bags hanging off it.